Interactive voice response (IVR) systems that provide information and channel calls to service agents in response to the spoken words or touch tone signaling of a telephone caller have been deployed for more than a decade. The traditional call center for handling service calls was based on a private branch exchange (PBX) that included core automatic call distributor (ACD) functions for connecting a caller to one of a plurality of agents. During the 1990s, the advent of the Internet, electronic commerce, and computer telephony integration (CTI) transformed the call center in ways that enabled delivery of caller data to agents, thereby enabling agents to become more efficient and to improve customer service levels. Today, many enterprises use multiple call or contact centers (both terms are used synonymously and interchangeably in the present application) that extend across different geographic regions, with communications taking place through public switched telephone networks (PSTNs) and Internet protocol (IP) enabled networks that support multi-channel (voice, e-mail, text chat, and Web collaboration) customer interaction.
By way of example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,798,877 teaches a system in which a caller utilizes a personal computer (PC) for establishing an Internet connection to an ACD and for permitting a caller to select a particular agent. A system for providing information about a telephone caller to a telephone agent, wherein caller-specific data of the caller is used to generate a web page that displays the identified information to the agent is taught in U.S. Pat. No. 6,871,212. U.S. Pat. No. 6,847,715 discloses a system for operatively integrating an ACD and an IVR unit in which an interaction input from a caller is stored and then transmitted to an appropriate agent workstation. The session initiation protocol (SIP) is a widely accepted standard for Internet conferencing, telephony, presence, events notification and instant messaging, which incorporates the notion of caller preferences for certain types of interactive communication sessions (e.g., designating a certain genre of music when on hold during a call). A method and apparatus for analyzing the performance of an IVR system with respect to routing of calls or contacts received in accordance with a contact flow model is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,879,685.
Call center systems often include telephony scripts that are designed in a manner that allows calling customers (callers) to navigate an IVR menu in order to perform self-services prior to connecting to a live call center agent. A caller who finds the IVR insufficient to service their needs typically ends up waiting in a queue for the next available agent. One problem with this type of system, however, is that callers who are unsuccessful in performing self-service through the IVR are placed in the last position of the agent wait queue. In other words, calling customers who attempt self-service may have to endure a wait time in queue that is just as long (or longer) than a caller who skips the IVR menu and proceeds directly to the agent wait queue. Thus, callers are not rewarded for trying to solve their problems through self-service and therefore have less incentive to use the automated features of the IVR system. Indeed, this problem provides callers with more incentive to bypass the IVR system entirely and go straight into the queue to wait to speak with a live call center agent.
One prior approach that attempts to reduce a caller's eventual wait time involves placing every caller in every queue the moment that the call arrives. However, a serious drawback with this solution is that it skews important statistics tracked by call centers since not every caller needs to speak with an agent and be placed in all of the ACD queues. This extra queuing also wastes call center resources required for this function. An additional disadvantage of this approach is that it normally operates to transfer a caller at the bottom of a queue as soon as an agent becomes available. But such a transfer may be undesirable because it could result in interrupting a caller who is attempting self-service through the IVR system.
Therefore, what is a needed is an improved call center system and method of operation that rewards callers who attempt self-service through an IVR or other automated system, yet who still eventually need assistance from a live call center agent.